Formatting an optical record carrier is known from a draft proposal of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS): Working Draft, T10/1675-D, Revision 1, 11 Oct. 2004, “INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY-Multimedia Commands MMC-5” (in this document further called MMC-5). In MMC-5, it is required to format a DVD+RW disc before user data may be written to it. A format command may be given according to the known protocol as defined in MMC-5. According to the format a user data zone is created, preceded by a lead-in control zone. After the data zone following the lead-in control zone, a further control zone, usually called lead-out, may be recorded at the end boundary of the data zone.
According to the format command, the control zones on the respective layers have to be recorded. The MMC-5 defines that, according to chapter 4.4.8.3 regarding the DVD+RW Basic Format, relative to the start of the record carrier, the Data Zone is the user space and should be addressed according to logical block addressing (LBA known from DVD-ROM). The physical to logical address mapping for DVD+RW is the same as that for DVD-ROM: when a physical sector number (PSN known from DVD-ROM) represents a sector in the data zone, its LBA=PSN-030000h. Furthermore MMC-5 describes the formatting, in chapter 6.5 regarding the FORMAT UNIT Command. The FORMAT UNIT command formats a medium into addressable logical blocks according to options defined in the MMC-5 protocol. In chapter 6.5.3.4.12 a specific example of the format, called DVD+RW Basic Format, is explained. In the command a Number of Blocks field shall be set to either the value returned by the Read Format Capacities command or FFFFFFFFh. The available capacity of the medium is detected by the Read Format Capacities command. Due to this setup the storage medium is formatted at its maximum available capacity, applying a predefined mapping of logical to physical addresses.
Currently recordable multilayer record carriers are being developed. On a multilayer record carrier each layer has its own annular data zone, while the annular data zones together may constitute a single logical data storage space. For example on a dual layer record carrier, on the first layer the annular data zone starts with the lead-in zone, and is terminated by a middle control zone. The second layer then starts with a middle control zone, and is terminated by the lead-out control zone.
However, the known way of formatting is inflexible, and does not allow multilayer carriers to be adapted to any intended use. In particular, MMC-5 does not provide any specific way of formatting a multilayer storage medium.